


Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before

by jimmytiberius



Category: Baseball RPF, Star Wars
Genre: Crossover, M/M, Rating is being updated in realtime as we see where this is going, Washington Nationals, Yuletide 2017, Yuletide Madness 2017, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-26
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2019-02-21 21:57:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13152834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jimmytiberius/pseuds/jimmytiberius
Summary: Trea knows from the moment he sets eyes on the stranger that he isn’t a local.(A farm boy and a rebel pilot walk into a Mos Eisley cantina...)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sharksdontsleep](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sharksdontsleep/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, SDS! This got away from me so it's not finished, which I apologize for, and it's not rated, because I'm not sure where it's going. But I really hope you enjoy the first chapter and I'm happy to take suggestions on what you'd like to see ;) (Although I do have a general outline.) Lots of love!
> 
> Also, not betaed, please comment with any corrections, etc.

Trea knows from the moment he sets eyes on the stranger that he isn’t a local.

For one thing, there’s not nearly enough sand in his hair. The guy has incredible hair, shoulder length and dark and curly, and everybody who lives around Mos Eisley knows better than to wear hair like that loose. Either you cut it all off or you cover it, or else you’ll find yourself cutting it off as soon as the next sandstorm starts rolling in from the Jundland Wastes a few klicks away. There’s just no way to get sand out of your hair at that point.

Also, the stranger is gorgeous, and Trea is pretty sure he wouldn’t have forgotten seeing him before. Mos Eisley is big enough, but not that big.

He’s a muscular human, a little taller than Trea and probably a little older too, and he keeps squinting up at the suns with a disgruntled expression as he trots down the narrow street. For all intents and purposes, he seems perfectly self possessed, as if he knows exactly where he’s going and he’s just not all that happy about it. But Trea’s seen that kind of swagger before, knows it usually means someone with something to hide and something to lose.

He really shouldn’t get distracted – he’s only in the spaceport for the day, and the credits burning a hole in his pocket are supposed to be for vaporator parts. He has a responsibility to his parents’ farm, and he doesn’t have the money to stay overnight in the spaceport if he runs out of time before suns-set.

But the stranger is heading down the steps into the cantina on the corner, and without another thought, Trea follows him.

Inside, it’s much darker than the blazing afternoon sunshine his eyes are used to, and it takes a moment to adjust. By then, the stranger has taken a seat at the bar. Trea hops up onto a stool a little ways down. From there he can admire the guy’s profile without, he hopes, drawing any attention to himself. It’s not like he has a plan here. He’s just following a gorgeous man into a bar. People do that all the time, right?

Trea orders a drink, something inexpensive and not very strong, and tries to act like he’s not blatantly ogling the guy. The stranger orders something too. He doesn’t seem like he’s paying much attention to his drink, though. Instead, he’s watching the various beings who come in and out. Looking for someone?

Eventually, the man hops off his stool, leaving his drink on the bar (big offworlder mistake), and approaches a booth across the way. Trea cranes his head to see who’s sitting there. It looks like an elderly Calamarian, and Trea is amazed, as always, that any of their species have managed to survive without desiccation on Tattooine. He supposes they must have some pretty advanced technology in their homes; there certainly isn’t enough pure water to go around for that to be all they depend on.

The stranger speaks to the Calamarian for a minute or two (too low for Trea to make it out), but he must not like what he hears, because he jumps back suddenly, hands raised as if he’s trying to placate someone. He says something brusque and lopes back to the bar, scowling.

And catches Trea staring.

He tries to turn his gaze away as quickly as possible, but he’s sure he’s been spotted. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the man down his drink, slam down a credit chip, and then turn to go.

Oh well. Trea keeps his eyes studiously fixed on his drink as the man passes him to head out the door. His creeping doesn’t seem to have gone over well – better give up on, well, whatever this was. Nothing, probably.

After waiting a minute or so, he pays for his half-finished drink and walks out.

Not unexpectedly, it’s bright outside, so Trea steps into the alleyway next to the door for a moment to squint and get his bearings. He does have errands to run, or this whole day will have been a waste, and there’ll be hell to pay for it.

He’s just about to step back out onto the street when the shadows next to him move, and all of a sudden there’s a blaster pressed to the base of his skull.

A voice growls, “Who sent you?”

“What?!”

“Who sent you?” A pause, and the blaster presses in harder. “You’re too skinny for a stormtrooper, but you could be an Imperial informant. Are you an Imperial informant?”

“No!” Trea tries to turn his head, but a hand joins the blaster and grabs him by his hair so he has to face forward. “Why would I be an Imperial informant? The Empire doesn’t care about us way out here!” Sure, there was some trouble a few years back, when Biggs Darklighter’s friend Luke and his family disappeared from their farm up near Anchorhead. Everyone was worried it would turn into more crackdowns, but the troops all left as suddenly as they’d appeared, and the status quo had remained.

“The Hutts, then? Jabba runs this town, doesn’t he?”

Trea shudders unconsciously. “I stay the hell away from the Hutts!”

“Then who paid you to follow me?” The hand in his hair yanks hard, and Trea’s eyes start to water. “Who do you work for?”

“No one! Nobody paid me!”

“You don’t deny you were following me, though?” The man’s voice is tight, dangerous. Trea has a bad feeling he’s dragging this conversation out for too long.

“I might’ve been?” Trea definitely is not blushing.

“Why?” The snarl comes from close to his ear, and Trea can feel the man’s breath on his neck. He knows he might be shot if his next response isn’t satisfactory, and he wills himself not to say something dumb.

“I… thought I might buy you a drink?” Yeah, that wasn’t it.

The man scoffs, and Trea prepares for the worst, his brains scattered all over the alley and his singed hair blowing away in the next dust storm. But suddenly the hand in his hair and the blunt pressure of the blaster both disappear, and he hears the man suck in air suddenly.

Trea stumbles forward, takes in a breath and sets his feet to run. He’s fast, he knows he is, and if he runs in a zigzag pattern like you’re supposed to and this guy is a lousy shot, he might just make it. But before he can get his feet to cooperate, he hears the man choke out, “What did you do to me?”

What? Trea spins around and then gapes. The gorgeous stranger has gone pale, and although his blaster is still pointed at Trea’s head, he’s leaning against the wall of the cantina and scrabbling at it with his other hand for support.

“I didn’t do anything!”

“Feel – drugged – how did you – ” The stranger stops and coughs, hard, blaster shaking but not dropping. Trea understands suddenly, with a sick lurch in the pit of his stomach.

“The bar – when you left your drink. There are some thieves around here that watch for that, slip you something, wait for you to pass out and then rob you. You should get out of here, fast. They could show up any second.”

His words are met with a harsh glare, as the stranger leans more heavily against the wall. “How do I know you weren’t the one who put something in my drink?”

“You don’t, I guess. I can’t prove it wasn’t me.” Trea glances toward the door of the cantina – he doesn’t want to get caught as a sitting duck here, either, and with a blaster still trained on him that’s exactly what he is. “But look, man, I’m just a farmer, I’m here for vaporator parts, okay, please, it wasn’t me. I don’t want your credits. I don’t work for anyone, I don’t want any trouble, I just want to go buy what I came for and get out of Mos Eisley.”

As Trea babbles, several things happen at once. The first is that the stranger starts to slide down the wall. The second is that the door to the cantina opens and he can hear multiple beings on their way up the stairs. The third is that Trea makes a split second decision.

He dashes forward and catches the man under the arms before he hits the ground. The man’s dark eyes are still wide, his mouth hanging open in shock, but he seems to be losing control of his legs. Trea grabs the blaster out of a now-slack hand and wraps his other arm around the man’s waist. “We gotta get out of here.”

His speeder is a few blocks away, but Trea hopes that all it’ll take is getting out into the sun and across the street for the cantina thieves to lose interest – they’re usually only after easy pickings. But the greater concern is what they put in this guy’s drink, and if it’s going to kill him.

The man can support his weight, mostly, and Trea is stronger than he looks. The two of them lurch through a gap in a caravan of banthas, then Trea points them down a side street and they make it maybe half a block before he has to stop. It’s the hottest part of the day, and this guy is heavy.

“You got a place? Somebody I can take you to that can take care of you?” The guy’s eyes are unfocused, and Trea shakes him. “Hey! Stay with me!”

“I got a place…” the man slurs. “Nobody there though. Just me. M’alone.”

It doesn’t sound like an invitation, even if Trea’s heart jumps a little bit, and he immediately feels guilty because this guy could literally be dying. “Okay, uh – what’s your name, anyway?”

The man’s voice is soft, but Trea can still hear him, half pressed together as they are. “Tony.”

“Okay, Tony. I’m Trea. Look, I got a speeder, and I can get you home, okay?”

“Why are… you helpin’ me?” Weak as he seems, Tony still sounds suspicious. “Who do you work for?”

“Nobody. Look, try to stay with me. I can’t take you home if you pass out, I won’t know where to go.” Trea tries to sound as reassuring as he can. Tony only groans in response.

They draw more than a few enterprising looks along the way, but Trea waves Tony’s blaster at anybody who looks like they might be thinking anything, and they slowly make it to where Trea’s parked his speeder. Thankfully, it’s even still there and intact, which is not a given even if Trea has souped up the security mechanisms himself.

Getting Tony into the passenger seat is a process of dragging and shoving that’s even tougher than getting them here, but finally Trea slides into the driver seat. He stows the blaster at his left side, away from Tony. “So, where to?”

Tony blinks owlishly around. Does he even know where they are? Is his brain fried? Finally, though, something seems to click, and with what sounds like maximal effort he drawls out, “Take a left…”

Trea takes a left.


	2. Chapter 2

Tony’s “place” turns out to be in a room-rental-by-the-night building on the north side of the spaceport. So he really can’t have been here long, Trea thinks. But the door is biometrically sealed, so at least he isn’t always as stupid as he was today – he’s smart enough to pay extra for that. If he weren’t, he probably wouldn’t have made it through his first night in Mos Eisley.

Trea drags Tony, whose eyes are almost completely closed, out of the speeder and up to the door he’s indicated, grateful it’s on the ground floor. He has to prop Tony up with one hand and lift one of Tony’s eyelids with the other to get the retinal scan to register, but thankfully, the door slides open.

The lights come on automatically, which is useful, because as Trea peers in, he realizes the single room is windowless. The door closes behind them and latches with a whirring of gears. There’s a clean-ish looking bed, which he maneuvers Tony onto, and an open doorway into a tiny ‘fresher in the corner, but otherwise, that’s it. Tony doesn’t seem to have much by way of belongings, either, just a small satchel on the floor and… is that a pilot’s helmet?

Tony seems to have finally passed out, so Trea can’t see the harm in snooping, just for a minute. He bends over and picks up the helmet, which is heavier than it looks. It definitely looks like something out of a fighter pilot holo, with the retractable blast shield and chin strap. There’s an insignia on either side that looks vaguely familiar, but Trea can’t place it.

He doesn’t know why he’s bothering anyway. The helmet could be bought, or stolen, or completely incidental. But there’s something about this guy, and that something is why he’s here in the first place, why he followed a stranger into a cantina and then half carried him for blocks and then drove him home. There’s something about this guy that’s pulling Trea in.

The guy in question is now completely insensible to the inner turmoil he’s causing. Setting the helmet back down, Trea inspects Tony nervously. He’s out cold, but his chest is rising and falling fine, with no sign of difficulty. Trea doesn’t know exactly what black market sedatives are in these days, but he thinks if Tony were going to stop breathing, he probably would’ve done it by now.

The only other thing he can think of to do is to roll Tony onto his side, in case he throws up or something, in case this is anything like what you’re supposed to do for someone who’s drunk. As Trea rolls him over, some of Tony’s hair falls into his face, those incredible curls that first caught Trea’s attention flopping over his eyes. Without thinking, Trea reaches out and smooths it back again. It’s as silky as it looks, and Trea lets his touch linger for just a moment, until Tony shifts slightly in his drugged sleep and Trea jumps back. But Tony just sighs and shows no sign of waking up. Trea waits for his heartbeat to slow down again, watching Tony breathe.

A sound from outside makes him look guiltily at his chrono. It’s getting late, and he still has vaporator parts to buy. And he needs to get home before dark. There’s no reason in hell for him to stand here and moon over a stranger, particularly one who doesn’t seem to be in any immediate danger.

Regretfully, Trea steps away from the bed, takes a deep breath, and heads out the door, back into the blazing sunshine. He hears the lock behind him. His credits are still in his pocket, and his speeder is right where he left it. There’s work to do.

 

Finding the parts he needs isn’t hard, although the haggling is as annoying as usual. Nobody in Mos Eisley wants to give anyone else in Mos Eisley a fair price for anything. So it takes a couple of hours and a number of different vendors before he finds someone willing to sell him what he needs at a cost he’s willing to pay. It’s also no picnic keeping track of all the different little pieces he’s looking for when he keeps getting distracted by his concern for Tony. He’s just loading the last odds and ends into the compartment at the back of his speeder, still trying to get Tony off his mind, when he sees something he somehow missed before: Tony’s blaster, still stashed next to his driver’s seat.

It’s amazing it’s still there, actually, since it’s plainly accessible from the outside, and the minute you walk away from a speeder around here, some enterprising soul is running their hands all over it, looking for a weakness in the security so they can either drive it off or pull it apart for scrap. But the blaster is on the smaller side and it’s wedged pretty far down the side of the seat, which is probably how Trea missed that he still had it in the first place.

Small or not, it’s still higher powered than his parents like to keep around the farm. They have a couple of stunners and two or three real blasters that they keep to scare the Tusken raiders away, but they’re pretty low caliber, and he knows his dad, in particular, hates weapons with a vengeance, wouldn’t even want the ones they have if they had a choice. So bringing this one home is probably not a great idea. He could sell it, he supposes, might walk away with a pretty penny if its charge is full, since that’s what’s really worth something in a blaster like that these days – the guns themselves are cheap. But he doesn’t feel right selling something he stole, even if it wasn’t on purpose. Throwing it away doesn’t seem like a good idea either, where some criminal could pick it up, or worse, a kid.

That only leaves one option.

He doubts anyone in the history of Mos Eisley has ever tried to return a stolen blaster to its rightful owner. But he has morals, really, that’s what this is about, it has nothing to do with satisfying his curiosity, nothing at all.

He’s grateful for the navigation in his speeder, because he has no idea how to get back to Tony’s place from here, but it only takes about twenty minutes of backtracking on the holomap before he pulls up in front of the same unremarkable door in the rent-by-the-night building. Trea slides out of his speeder and takes care to engage the security – it won’t do him any good to have everything he’s just purchased stolen while he wastes even more time on what’s probably a terrible idea.

He tries to hold the blaster as unthreateningly down at his side as possible as he steps up to the door and presses the buzzer. There’s no immediate response, but Trea makes himself count to fifteen in his head before he presses it again. After the second buzz, he hears movement.

Something on the other side of the door clicks, and Trea gets the feeling he’s being examined through an unseen peephole. The feeling is validated when a muffled voice growls out, “The hell do you want?”

“Um… Tony?” No response. Trea tries to seem nonchalant. “You, uh, you left your blaster in my speeder earlier. I just wanted to stop by and give it back. On my way home. So.” He lifts the blaster, then stops, lowers it again. “So do you want it back, or…”

After a long pause, the door slides open. Trea steps into the dimly lit room, blaster still held loosely at his side. He immediately regrets it when the door closes behind him and suddenly there’s Tony, holding an extremely tiny blaster that’s trained right between Trea’s eyes.

“Drop it, kid.”

Stupid, stupid, stupid. A few hours ago he was judging this guy for making dumb offworlder mistakes, and now he’s walking straight into traps himself. Idiot.

On the upside, he thinks as he slowly bends down to set down the blaster, Tony looks like he’s come through being drugged just fine.

Trea stands up straight again, raises his hands up by his shoulders. “Look, I just wanted to give your gun back. I don’t want any trouble.”

Tony glares at him down the barrel of the tiny blaster. “Then why did you come back?”

“I told you!”

Tony rolls his eyes. “Right. Real noble. I’m only gonna ask you one more time. Who do you work for?”

“Nobody!” Trea glances around wildly, trying to think of how he can prove it. His eyes light on the helmet next to the bed. “You were out cold earlier! If I were trying something here, I could’ve killed you then, taken all your stuff, but I didn’t!”

“Maybe you were trying to gain my trust. Make me think you weren’t a threat.”

“I’m not a threat!” Out of ideas, Trea figures he may as well try the truth. If he dies embarrassed, he won’t be any more dead than otherwise. “I followed you earlier because I thought you were cute, okay?”

Whatever Tony’s expecting, it wasn’t that. His mouth twitches, although his blaster doesn’t. “What?”

“I told you earlier, I wanted to buy you a drink. Not a lot of guys around here who look like you. So sue me.” Especially, he adds mentally, since everybody his age has been disappearing off to join either the Imperial Academy or the Rebel Alliance.

All of a sudden, he knows where he’s seen the insignia on the helmet before.

“Are you a rebel?” Trea blurts out before he can stop himself. Shit! Bad idea. Good job, batting a thousand, now he’s definitely gonna get shot.

Tony doesn’t bat an eye, though. “What makes you think that?”

There’s no use lying. “Your helmet. I saw it when I brought you back here earlier.”

“Oh, the helmet.” Tony smirks, though it looks more like a lazy grin. “How do you know I didn’t steal that?”

“Did you?”

Silence. Just the smirk.

Okay. Still not working. Trea tries another strategy, rapidly running out of ideas: he widens his eyes and tries to look as young and innocent as possible. “I don’t actually care if you’re a rebel or not. Nobody out here cares. The Empire leaves us alone, they haven’t been here since they burned the Skywalker-Larses’ place anyway, and nobody pays attention to politics on Tatooine. All anybody cares about is money. So if you don’t have any, then you’ve got nothing to worry about. And you’ve got nothing to worry about from me anyway.”

He’s rambling again, badly. But Tony’s not smirking any more – he’s got a funny look on his face now.

“Did you say Skywalker?”

“Yeah, Skywalker-Lars.” Trea frowns, trying to figure out what that has to do with anything. “They had a moisture farm until the Empire killed them all trying to track down some droids. A middle aged couple and their nephew. They never even found the nephew’s body. It was a big tragedy.”

To Trea’s shock, Tony lowers the blaster. His face is blank, impassive, but he’s leaning forward slightly. “What was the nephew’s name?”

“Luke Skywalker.”

“Did you know him?”

“Not that well. He was friends with my friend Biggs, before Biggs left for the academy. They were a couple years older than me.” Actually, Trea kissed Luke on a dare once at Biggs’ seventeenth birthday party, which is kind of creepy now that Luke is dead. But Tony doesn’t need to know about that.

Tony, though, suddenly looks a lot more interested. “What did you say your name was again, kid?”

“Trea. Trea Turner.”

There’s a long pause. Tony looks Trea up and down, clearly appraising him, though for what, Trea has no idea. Finally, Tony holsters the blaster, takes a step towards him.

“Okay, Trea Turner. I’m Tony Rendon. I’m in the Rebel Alliance, and you’re going to help me with something.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Age notes, for the curious: Luke is 18 or 19 (depending who you ask) when he leaves Tatooine and therefore 22-23 when he comes back. So Trea is about 20 here. That makes Tony the same age as Luke (23).


End file.
